Monday, December 31, 2007

Right before the holidays David Sparks, a business litigation attorney and blogger, wrote a nice review of Bee Docs' Timeline on his MacSparky blog.

Here is a quote from the review:

As an example I prepared a timeline for a client on a dispute I’m involved with where I included images of key contracts and letters throughout a transaction. It took me all of about ten minutes to prepare and looked very professional. Even more importantly, it was critical in conveying important information. Following the meeting I emailed a PDF of the timeline (accomplished with one click in Timeline) and the client and I still refer to it in our phone conversations.

For Christmas, Lisa bought me a "ticket stub diary" to organize the file folder full of concert tickets that I have been saving over the years. It is fun remembering all the great concerts I have seen. I regret not keeping track of the jazz club shows I've been to (they don't issue tickets), but at least quite a few of my music memories are archived in some way.

I decided to put together a timeline based on my ticket stubs. To see the full PDF version, click the image.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

I just posted the first update to Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. Those who have already downloaded the software will be prompted to update the next time you launch the software if you have automatic updating turned on in the preferences. If not, you can manually check using the "Check for Updates" item in the Timeline menu.

The most important changes in this version are high resolution printing of event images and help documentation! Please take a moment to browse through the help documentation and let me know what you think. I will continue to improve it based on customer feedback in future versions. To open the help documentation you can choose "Timeline Help" in the Help menu or use the new Leopard search functionality in the Help menu.

To those of you who let me know how important documentation was to you, I appreciate your patience.

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Each year, my family sends out a holiday card to friends and family with a quick overview of the big moments from the previous year. This year, my wife suggested sending a timeline. Here is an photo of the inside of the card we sent out:

In case someone else would like to try this, here are the steps we used to put it together:

We created an album in iPhoto of photos representing events from our past year. There we 23 photos. We tried to avoid having more than one photo of the same event.

Using the iPhoto importer in Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0, we created an automatic timeline based on the date the photos were taken.

We added a few more events (text only) for things we didn't have pictures for.

We purchased pre-scored paper for the cards. It was A7 size, so we chose A7 from the Page Setup menu item and switched to Print Preview mode so that we could see how the timeline would look on the paper.

We made the font and images small enough to fit on one page and then adjusted the image sizes one by one to make some larger, but still fitting on one page.

Then we exported the timeline as PDF and took it to a print shop, where they made nice color prints of the timeline on the inside of the card.

If you think of another fun use for Bee Docs' Timeline, please drop me a line.

One of the design goals for this release was to make the date formats flexible enough to handle all the localizations that Mac OS X supports. I'm happy to see that people in other countries are finally able to use Bee Docs' Timeline with their preferred date formats.

However, the user interface and documentation (and the website) are only in English. I would love to expand this to many more languages, so I'm working on a strategy to get this done. If anyone reading this blog has experience localizing Mac software to languages other than your own, I'd appreciate any advice and insight you can provide into your process.

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0 has under development for 18 months and I've been working pretty much full time on it for the last 13 months.

Special thanks to the T2 User Design Panel and to the hundreds of folks who has given me feedback over the past 3 years. Thanks also to Kenichi for the wonderful icon artwork, Bill for help with the website, Tony for help with the filming, Michael for the website concept, the folks at Apple who have provided lots of valuable advice and encouragement, and Exbiblio for letting me use their very cool office space. Most of all, thanks to the folks who have bought a license and made it possible for me to do this.

Give me about two days to relax (just kidding) and then start sending your suggestions, feedback, and ideas. Most of all, I'd love to hear how you are using Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. It would be fun to post some real-world examples of your work on the blog.

Monday, December 10, 2007

Here is a video demo that my brother David did for his NYC Art Gallery website:

As he was working on his video, he didn't know I was doing demo videos for Bee Docs' Timeline. When I posted my first video on my personal blog, he sent me an e-mail right away to make sure that I knew he wasn't copying the idea. I guess both of us have always been a bit sensitive towards appearing unoriginal.

Friday, December 07, 2007

The new website for Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0 will go live December 12, 2007. It will feature six beautiful timelines, each of them made in a few minutes or less along with a video of the timeline being made. Here is one of the featured timelines which lists seven Volkswagen models by the year they were released:

And here is the video of this timeline being created in three and a half minutes:

Saturday, December 01, 2007

Well, here we are in December!
I've picked December 12 as the official release date for Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. That gives me a couple weeks to finish up my demo videos and marketing materials as well as fix any last minute bugs that show up in the beta testing.
However, I want to get the beta in some more hands, so if you are using Leopard and would like to try out the beta, please send an e-mail to beta@beedocuments.com. While you are at it, please let me know who you are and how you plan to use Bee Docs' Timeline 2.0. Thanks!